Gapminder - Education Statistics

I spent a few minutes today playing around with Gapminder World to see if the data they had could show anything interesting regarding education. Perhaps such a powerful infographic/data visualization tool could show us clearly what factors have definitive correlations between math and literacy rates. I wish they had statistics that measured how happy people are, or data that showed the breadth of study (i.e. how many of them had access to art, music, theater, culinary arts, philosophy, or other classes). But, I'll have to do with what has been measured, which by-the-way is an interesting set of data in itself. What gets measured is a direct indicator of the values of those collecting data. This act in itself contains an important bias. It means that the values of those who do not put much faith in data and statistics are always under-represented in data and statistics. Therefore, naturally data and statistics will more likely support the values of the "data-driven" rather than those who are not.

That said, here are some of the more interesting data sets I found:


What was interesting about this graph was when you animate it there doesn't appear to be any correlation between GDP/capita and math achievement in 1995 but as time goes on over the 12 years of the data set all data sets come to convergence upon an emerging diagonal line indicating that the world is trending toward income being an indicator of math achievement level but perhaps it didn't used to be.

Another place where GDP/capita appears to have a direct correlation is with adult literacy rates as shown here:


But, the correlation is not nearly as strong when it comes to those only between the ages of 15 and 24. Odd. I wonder why this is.

While the GDP/capita data seems to show a strong correlation on math achievement and literacy rates, what seems to be a stronger indicator is fertility rates. Gapminder clearly shows an inverse relationship between math proficiency & adult literacy and the number of children per family.



When it comes to wealth distribution the results are less clear. Gapminder has many different data sets that could be used to draw this comparison but none of them are absolutely conclusive. By looking at who the outliers are in these it seems how nations acquire the majority of their wealth matters as much as how it is distributed. It seems like we could derive from these statistics that the more stable and sustainable the nation's wealth combined with how evenly distributed it is determines the level of math achievement and adult literacy.

ManyEyes - Education Data

Not sure how I am going to use these yet but here are a few interesting infographics I found on the ManyEyes site today related to education:

Public education spending, total vs. per student:



School District Technology Use:



Impact of Testing Culture on Student Contact Days:



So, if only 61.8% of our school days can be spent on anything but testing and test prep (low-level cognitive skills) and technology resources are monopolized for most of the year for these two purposes, how much of our education spending is spent on authentic, high-quality education? Lets go back to that chart with the six countries and see how our adjusted spending compares:

Now this is starting to make more sense. Still, even with that adjustment it seems Japan still spends less than we do. But, perhaps that can be explained by the amount of time they spend each year in school not doing test prep or dumbing down their curriculum to teach only the rote skills assessed.

On Monday I will do a breakdown of how much standardized testing likely costs Minnesotan's (beyond the $23 Million/year we give Pearson Education to create and manage our tests). I will also create some infographics that will show what we might be able to do with that money instead.

StatPlanet - Education Data Comparison

In preparation for my forthcoming Weekly Tech Tip on Data Visualization & Infographic tools I have spent a bit of time this morning exploring StatPlanet. StatPlanet is a website that pulls tons of data from groups and organizations like UNESCO and PISA about the health and welfare of different countries around the world. One area they happen to have a lot of data about is Education. I am not quite sure how many of these infographics will make it into my final Tech Tip video but the tool does seem like it might be worth a at least some exploration.

This form of data ranking countries on topics such as student test scores in math, reading , and science tends to reinforce the idea that we are in competition with these other nations, a notion explicitly expressed in films like Waiting for Superman and repeatedly reinforced whenever a politician says something along the lines of "Winning the Future." But, since that is such a broadly held viewpoint, especially in the U.S. perhaps these infographics are still worth considering.

Percentage of GDP spent on Education:



According to this data, the US spends 5.3% of GDP on education which is clearly a lower percentage investment than other many other nations. Contrasted with Finland, which is currently regarded as having perhaps the best education system in the world who spends 6.3%. Per capita, the US GDP is $45,550.3 and Finland's is $34,582.4. So when you calculate per capita spending on education this actually means that the US invests $2,414.17 and Finland invests $2,178.69. Clearly the US spend more. How does this break down for some of the other countries we are supposedly competing against:


Clearly the US outspends all these nations in per capita education spending. You would think we would rank hire in test scores:

Math Scores:


How do we rank among the six countries included in the table above?

2 Hong Kong
3 Finland
6 Japan
7 Canada
10 New Zealand
28 United States

How about for reading?


And the rankings:

1 Finland
2 Hong Kong
4 Canada
5 New Zealand
6 Japan
15 United States

And for Science:

Rankings:

1 Finland
2 Hong Kong
4 Japan
5 New Zealand
6 Canada
20 United States

Looking at these infographics would lead one to believe that money is not the determining factor in a good education. Except, among these other five countries Finland clearly spends more money on education than the others and the test scores seem to show a payoff. Somehow the U.S. is an outlier in these statistics. Could it be how these education dollars are spent that really matters? Could it be that somehow the U.S. has been wasting much of their investment in practices that don't produce learning results? I suspect yes. So, what is the U.S. wasting their time and resources on?

More to come.

Wordle Fun

I am getting ready to make one of my Weekly Tech Tip videos that I hope will be ready within about a week. State testing obligations have kind of put a wrench in my normal routine and therefore I've not been able to keep up with my regular video production schedule. I also really want this one to to drive some important points home. Since I have to submit all of these to the Minnesota Department of Education for possible inclusion in their iTunesU channel the content of this one I really want to make sure is well done. The topic of the forthcoming video will be on the use of data visualization tools and infographics to improve math comprehension. For my examples I am going to draw data from the standardized testing business we are caught in the grips of. So, while the stated purpose of the video will be to show how to use infographic tools to help people understand numbers the numbers I will be using will hopefully draw some light on the realities of what the decision to let standardized tests be the be all and end all measure of school, teacher, and student success really does.

So, since our state tests limit my bandwidth and my ability to create video I thought I would share some of the infographics I am developing for this future instructional video. Some of these may make it in the video and some may not. But, lets have some fun anyway.

I think I will start by demonstrating a tool that for many of us has become a cliche...Wordle. Now, I am not a huge fan of this tool and at this point I feel like I have seen enough of them. That said, I still think it is a useful tool for analyzing the frequency of terms used in a larger text or speech. So, I today I will apply Wordle to some of the most important documents associated with standardized testing. Perhaps it can show us something, perhaps not, I don't know.

No Child Left Behind Act:

A Nation at Risk:
The Imperative for Educational Reform:

The Principles of Scientific Management (by Fredrick Taylor):


The Core Knowledge Blog:

Well, I'm not entirely sure how these infographics are helpful or what they tell us. One thing that jumps out at me clearly is the absence of the word"Learning" from any of these Wordles.

What do you notice?

What other documents should we apply this to?

Tomorrow I will post something with numbers.